Build new transit infrastructure in high-density areas.

Frances Bula, in her Friday write up of Translink’s three options for the mayors, had this to say about why it’s hard to provide public transit for the Lower Mainland:

All cities in North America are struggling over how to pay for roads and transit, but Vancouver has exceptional challenges because it covers an area three times as large as that of Toronto’s transit commission and outside of the city’s dense downtown core and the heavily travelled Broadway corridor, it’s mostly low-density development with patches of agricultural land in the middle. That makes it expensive to provide even minimal service to most of the region.

Density and public transit are two great tastes that go great together. They need to be developed together. But also, Translink could make the most of new transit infrastructure by building it in places that are already dense. So why should Translink expand service into “low-density development with patches of agricultural land in the middle” when it’s not doing that for “the heavily traveled Broadway corridor”?